X86 mini PC

[ispyisail]

Hi all

Fanless Soft Router Intel Celeron J4125 Mini PC Quad Core 4x Intel i225 2.5G LAN HDMI VGA

Question: What are the chances of the extra LAN ports working?



https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004 ... Lk6J2gxqH0

[phgerin]

Got one with 2 LAN port, J4125, 128GB SSD and it works.
The wifi was not working (tried with openwrt, gargoyle, opnsense).

[Lantis]

They work fine. I've got a very similar model.

[smoke_15]

I purchased something similar with a Qualcomm atheros 9485 wifi.
Some observations:

1. Gargoyle 1.14 EFI combined build doesn't seem to have a driver built in nor does it come with kernel modules for the wifi. Any suggestions for the fastest way in getting this up and running?

2. Grub also doesn't want to autoboot after the timeout. Have you manually press enter.

3. If there's a power outage, these mini x86 PCs will need to manually turn it on via switch. Other purpose built routers automatically boot if there's power. I can see this bring a nuisance.

[Lantis]

I've never experienced point 2, I never interact with the grub menu.
My x86 box also restarts itself on power outage every time. This is a bios setting generally and has not much to do with Gargoyle.

For point 1, the easiest way is to do a custom build with your required drivers selected.

[smoke_15]

Thanks for clarifying. Yes I am not sure what's going on with the grub menu. Just seems to want to wait indefinitely on the openwrt screen. I need to look into that a bit more. Agreed that the power cycling thing isn't a gargoyle issue but HW.

Regarding the kernel drivers, I am curious why it wasn't built with kernel modules supporting most common wifi/lan hardware on the x86. Certainly space isn't an issue. This way users could simply install the kmod drivers they need.

[smoke_15]

Based on the guidance in viewtopic.php?t=11883, and the notes in the README.md plus several Ubuntu installs later (kept running out of space in the virtual box, 50 GiB did the trick), got an x86-64 squashfs EFI image built! This was by taking the 1.14 sources as a starting point, tweaking the kernel config ever so slightly to include the ATH9K drivers in the kernel.

lspci -k now shows that the AR9485 device has a driver attached to it.

I don't see a default wifi being emitted using the said 'gargoyle'. Anything I may be missing?

[smoke_15]

Managed to get in with the LAN and turn on the wifi. For some reason only see 2.4G, not the 5G.

Even turning on the 2.4G, seems to not be happy:

Code: Select all

Sat Jul 29 17:07:09 2023 daemon.notice netifd: radio0 (22104): Command failed: Not found 
Sat Jul 29 17:07:09 2023 daemon.notice netifd: radio0 (22104): Device setup failed: HOSTAPD_START_FAILED 
Sat Jul 29 17:07:09 2023 daemon.crit netifd: Wireless device 'radio0' setup failed, retry=0 
Sat Jul 29 17:07:09 2023 daemon.notice netifd: Wireless device 'radio0' is now down 
Sat Jul 29 17:07:10 2023 user.notice firewall: Reloading firewall due to ifup of wanб (eth0) 
Sat Jul 29 17:07:10 2023 user.notice firewall: Reloading firewall due to ifup of wan (eth0) 
root@Gargoyle:/#

[Lantis]

Can you post your build config? Most likely a piece of the puzzle missing which is preventing it coming up.

Wifi offline by default sorry (as in regular OpenWrt as well).
Well done on getting a working build at the very least!

[smoke_15]

Thanks, getting the custom build going isn't all that bad. Well.. assuming you've compiled the linux kernel before.

I just tried attaching my config but says "board attachment quota is reached".

Here are additions in the new kernel config after manually adding the ath9k driver:
CONFIG_PACKAGE_libiwinfo=y
CONFIG_ZABBIX_POSTGRESQL=y
CONFIG_PACKAGE_libiwinfo-data=y
CONFIG_PACKAGE_wireless-regdb=y
CONFIG_PACKAGE_kmod-ath=y
CONFIG_ATH_USER_REGD=y
CONFIG_PACKAGE_ATH_DFS=y
CONFIG_PACKAGE_kmod-ath9k=y
CONFIG_ATH9K_SUPPORT_PCOEM=y
CONFIG_PACKAGE_kmod-ath9k-common=y
CONFIG_PACKAGE_kmod-cfg80211=y
CONFIG_PACKAGE_kmod-mac80211=y
CONFIG_PACKAGE_MAC80211_DEBUGFS=y
CONFIG_PACKAGE_MAC80211_MESH=y
CONFIG_PACKAGE_wsdd2=y
CONFIG_PACKAGE_hostapd-common=y
CONFIG_DRIVER_11N_SUPPORT=y
CONFIG_PACKAGE_iw=y
CONFIG_PACKAGE_iwinfo=y